Thursday, October 26, 2017

Speaking of assaults, unelected NY Times is conducting an assault on the public by seeking to censor internet news it deems to be "Russian propaganda." NY Times would block news from Wikileaks not because it wasn't true and important news, but because it wasn't approved by pompous asses at CIA-Daniel Lazare, Consortium News

The latest example is a front-page article
in Tuesday’s New York Times. Entitled “YouTube Gave Russian Outlet
Portal Into U.S.,” it offers the usual blah-blah-blah about Kremlin
agents engaging in the political black arts. But it goes a step farther
by attempting to discredit a perfectly legitimate news organization.

Reporters Daisuke Wakabayashi and Nicholas Confessore begin by noting
that RT, the Moscow-funded TV channel formerly known as “Russia Today,”
is now an Internet powerhouse and then observes that when it became the
first YouTube news channel to surpass one million views, YouTube Vice
President Robert Kyncl “joined an RT anchor in a studio, where he
praised RT for…providing ‘authentic’ content instead of ‘agendas or
propaganda.’”

Cue the ominous background music. “But now,” the article continues,
“as investigators in Washington examine the scope and reach of Russian
interference in United States policy, the once-cozy relationship between
RT and YouTube is drawing closer scrutiny.”

Why? Because RT took advantage of its “prominent presence on
YouTube’s search results” to pepper viewers with negative videos about
Hillary Clinton. According to Wakabayashi and Confessore:

“As the presidential election heated up in the spring of 2016,
RT consistently featured negative stories about Mrs. Clinton, according
to United States intelligence officials.That included claims of
corruption at her family foundation and ties to Islamic extremism,
frequent coverage of emails stolen by Russian operatives from Mrs.
Clinton’s campaign chairman, and accusations that she was in poor
physical and mental health.”

The story quotes “the American intelligence community” describing RT
as the Kremlin’s “principal international propaganda outlet” and
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia calling YouTube “a target-rich
environment for any disinformation campaign.”

Then comes the kicker: “Much like the Russian-controlled pages on
Facebook, RT’s YouTube videos comply with YouTube’s community
guidelines, which cover things like nudity, copyright violations and
promoting violence against a group based on race or religion. But not
propaganda.”

Bottom line: disinformation and propaganda are what RT is all
about. But there’s a problem: the Times article is less than clear about
what RT actually got wrong.

Making Real News into ‘Fake News’

The web version, for example, links to an RT interview with WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange that ran shortly before the 2016 election. The
topic is a September 2014 email
obtained by Wikileaks in which [Hillary] Clinton acknowledges that “the
governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia…are providing clandestine
financial and logistic support to ISILand other radical Sunni groups in
the region.”

“I think this is the most significant email in the whole collection,”
Assange states as interviewer John Pilger murmurs in agreement. “As
analysts know, and even the US government has mentioned…some Saudi
figures have been supporting ISIS, funding ISIS. But the dodge has
always been that it’s just some rogue princes using their cut of the oil
to do what they like and – but actually – the government
disapproves. But that email says no, it is the government of Saudi and
the government of Qatar that have been funding the ISIS.”

Is this dezinformatsiya, as the Russians call
disinformation? The Times implies that is, yet in fact Assange’s
statement is perfectly correct. The email’s authenticity is unchallenged
while there is also no question that Arab Gulf interests have
contributed massively to the Clinton Foundation.

As the foundation’s own records show,
Saudi Arabia has given anywhere from $10 million to $25 million over
the years, Qatar has contributed between $1 million and $5 million,
while other Gulf governments, corporations, and individuals have kicked
in anywhere from $13 million to $50 million more.

It’s as if Jesse Jackson had been found taking payoffs from South
Africa’s white supremacist government during apartheid. If that
had occurred, the Times would have been up in arms. Yet not only has it
never said a word about the 2014 Clinton email, it is now going after RT
for putting out news that it has sat on for months.

What’s going on here? Is the Times suggesting that truth is
irrelevant and that the only thing that counts is where it
originates? Is it arguing that what’s said matters less than who’s
saying it – and that if it’s RT, WikiLeaks, or whomever, we must all
stop up our ears so that the message will be blocked?

Barring Foreign Information

The article goes on to suggest that “RT’s embrace of YouTube shows
how difficult it could be to limit foreign influence.” Calling for
foreign influence to be rolled back for no other reason than the
fact that it’s foreign is very dangerous.Indeed, it’s nothing more than
a liberal echo of the isolationist, America-First politics practiced by
Donald Trump except that where Trump wants to bar immigrants and
imports, the Times wants to bar foreign information, no matter how
pertinent or how truthful. Instead of reporting news, it is seeking to
block it.

While the Times was chasing after RT, The Washington Post was going public with the truly sensational news
that the Clinton campaign’s law firm had paid for the notorious
Christopher Steele dossier, famous for charging that Trump had paid for a
couple of prostitutes to urinate on a Moscow hotel bed once occupied by
Barack and Michelle Obama.

The result of all this has been nonsense piled on top of
nonsense. More than a year after the Democratic National Committee’s
massive email dump, there is still no evidence that the Kremlin was
responsible or even that it was a hack at all.(Wikileaks, with its
100-percent record for veracity, continues to maintain that the emails were leaked by an insider.)

Indeed, the sole basis for the charge is a report by CrowdStrike, a
California-based cyber-security firm whose chief technical officer,
Dmitri Alperovitch, is known both for his anti-Kremlin bias and his
close ties to the Clinton camp. (See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Scandal Hidden Behind Russia-gate.”)

The FBI never inspected the DNC’s computer servers to see for itself
if they were truly hacked while a major CrowdStrike foul-up – it
subsequently accused pro-Russian separatists of using similar malware to
target Ukrainian artillery units – has gone largely unreported even
though the firm wasforced to issue a retraction.

Certainly, the Times has never breathed a word about the blunder.

The NYT’s Motives

What’s the goal here? One aim, of course, is to drive Trump out of
office – not by opposing him from the left, however, but from the right
on the basis of anti-Russian xenophobia. But another is what might be
described as an exercise in induced mass conformity.

If, thanks to Russia-gate, the Times succeeds in scaring Americans
into believing that the country is being hit with an epidemic of “fake
news” even though no one knows what the term even means; if it can
persuade readers that news is “disinformation”simply because it comes
from a Russian outlet; if it can convince them that “Kremlin-aligned
agents secretly built fake Facebook groups to foment political division”"...

(continuing): "even though “Kremlin-aligned” can mean just about anything under the
sun – if it can do all those things, then it can persuade them to turn
their critical faculties off and believe whatever the U.S. intelligence
agencies (and The New York Times) tell them to believe.

The integration of the corporate media and the so-called
“intelligence community” will thus be complete.Instead of information,
the result will be a steady stream of CIA propaganda aimed at dulling
critical faculties and preparing the public for one imperial
misadventure after another.The Times, to paraphrase Chico Marx,
is essentially asking readers, “Who you gonna believe, the CIA or your
own critical faculties?” The correct answer, it seems to think, is the
former. Rather than a force for enlightenment, the “newspaper of
record,” is turning into the opposite."

Comment:
The NY Times can do this because the US has only one functioning
political party. The entire political class
and media are on the same side (open borders, endless wars paid for by US taxpayers (global slaves), massive free trade deals, extreme
globalism). There are no checks and balances to protect taxpayers. This describes a dictatorship.